Amazon Web Services improves GovCloud management

Users of Amazon Web Services’ GovCloud can now take advantage of CloudFormation, which aims to make it easier to manage more complex environments.

As companies get more used to running applications in the cloud, they are also putting together more complex systems. That in turn puts higher demands on management platforms, which have to allow users to take better advantage of the programmability and scalability of the cloud.

CloudFormation is one of Amazon’s answers, and the goal is to give developers and systems administrators a way to create and manage a collection of related resources, provisioning and updating them in an orderly and predictable fashion using templates.

Thanks to CloudFormation, they don’t have to figure out the order in which different services need to be provisioned or the subtleties of how to make those dependencies work, according to Amazon.

The company is as interested as any other vendor in getting public-sector customers. GovCloud is an isolated section of Amazon’s hosted environment designed to allow U.S. government agencies and customers to move sensitive workloads into the cloud by addressing their specific regulatory and compliance requirements.

Earlier this year Amazon finally received certification under the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRamp), which the company said will lower the cost of implementing its cloud services among government organizations and agencies.

The company will also be hosting its fourth annual Worldwide Public Sector Summit on Sep. 10 in Washington, D.C. The free, one-day event is for developers and technical leaders who are looking for an introduction or advanced guidance on architecture and engineering, Amazon said.